Enlightening the Chemistry of Infalling Envelopes and Accretion Disks Around Sun-Like Protostars: The ALMA FAUST Project

The huge variety of planetary systems discovered in recent decades likely depends on the early history of their formation. In this contribution, we introduce the FAUST Large Program which focuses specifically on the early history of solar-like protostars and their chemical diversity at scales of ∼ 50 au, where planets are expected to form. In particular, the goal of the project is to reveal and quantify the variety of chemical composition of the envelope/disk system at scales of 50 au in a sample of Class 0 and I protostars representative of the chemical diversity observed at larger scales. For each source, we propose a set of molecules able to (1) disentangle the components of the 50–2000 au envelope/disk system, (2) characterize the organic complexity in each of them, (3) probe their ionization structure, and (4) measure their molecular deuteration. The output will be a homogeneous database of thousands of images from different lines and species, i.e., an unprecedented source survey of the chemical diversity of solar-like protostars. FAUST will provide the community with a legacy dataset that will be a milestone for astrochemistry and star formation studies.

Searching for Magnetospheres around Herbig Ae/Be Stars

We describe four different approaches for the detection of magnetospheric accretion among Herbig Ae/Be stars with accretion disks. Studies of several unique objects have been carried out. One of the objects is the Herbig Ae star HD 101412 with a comparatively strong magnetic field. The second is the early-type Herbig B6e star HD 259431. The existence of a magnetosphere in these objects was not recognized earlier. In both cases, a periodicity in the variation of some line parameters, originating near the region of the disk/star interaction, has been found. The third object is the young binary system HD 104237, hosting a Herbig Ae star and a T Tauri star. Based on the discovery of periodic variations of equivalent widths of atmospheric lines in the spectrum of the primary, we have concluded that the surface of the star is spotted. Comparing our result with an earlier one, we argue that these spots can be connected with the infall of material from the disk onto the stellar surface through a magnetosphere. The fourth example is the Herbig Ae/Be star HD 37806. Signatures of magnetospheric accretion in this object have been identified using a different method. They were inferred from the short-term variability of the He i λ5876 line profile forming in the region of the disk/star interaction.

Nonassociative black ellipsoids distorted by R-fluxes and four dimensional thin locally anisotropic accretion disks

We construct nonassociative quasi-stationary solutions describing deformations of Schwarzschild black holes, BHs, to ellipsoid configurations, which can be black ellipsoids, BEs, and/or BHs with ellipsoidal accretion disks. Such solutions are defined by generic off-diagonal symmetric metrics and nonsymmetric components of metrics (which are zero on base four dimensional, 4-d, Lorentz manifold spacetimes but nontrivial in respective 8-d total (co) tangent bundles). Distorted nonassociative BH and BE solutions are found for effective real sources with terms proportional to $$\hbar \kappa $$ ħ κ (for respective Planck and string constants). These sources and related effective nontrivial cosmological constants are determined by nonlinear symmetries and deformations of the Ricci tensor by nonholonomic star products encoding R-flux contributions from string theory. To generate various classes of (non) associative /commutative distorted solutions we generalize and apply the anholonomic frame and connection deformation method for constructing exact and parametric solutions in modified gravity and/or general relativity theories. We study properties of locally anisotropic relativistic, optically thick, could and thin accretion disks around nonassociative distorted BHs, or BEs, when the effects due to the rotation are negligible. Such configurations describe angular anisotropic deformations of axially symmetric astrophysical models when the nonassociative distortions are related to the outer parts of the accretion disks.

Why Have the Observed High-frequency QPOs Not Been Produced by (MHD) Computer Simulations of Black Hole Accretion Disks?

We compare some predictions of Wagoner & Tandon (WT) with the results of the hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of Reynolds & Miller (RM). It appears that the MHD simulations were not run for long enough and the numerical damping was not small enough to produce the observed high-frequency QPOs (and the g-mode seen in the hydro simulations).

Automatic Search of Cataclysmic Variables Based on LightGBM in LAMOST-DR7

The search for special and rare celestial objects has always played an important role in astronomy. Cataclysmic Variables (CVs) are special and rare binary systems with accretion disks. Most CVs are in the quiescent period, and their spectra have the emission lines of Balmer series, HeI, and HeII. A few CVs in the outburst period have the absorption lines of Balmer series. Owing to the scarcity of numbers, expanding the spectral data of CVs is of positive significance for studying the formation of accretion disks and the evolution of binary star system models. At present, the research for astronomical spectra has entered the era of Big Data. The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopy Telescope (LAMOST) has produced more than tens of millions of spectral data. the latest released LAMOST-DR7 includes 10.6 million low-resolution spectral data in 4926 sky regions, providing ideal data support for searching CV candidates. To process and analyze the massive amounts of spectral data, this study employed the Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) algorithm, which is based on the ensemble tree model to automatically conduct the search in LAMOST-DR7. Finally, 225 CV candidates were found and four new CV candidates were verified by SIMBAD and published catalogs. This study also built the Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models and used Accuracy, Precision, Recall, the F1-score, and the ROC curve to compare the four models comprehensively. Experimental results showed that LightGBM is more efficient. The search for CVs based on LightGBM not only enriches the existing CV spectral library, but also provides a reference for the data mining of other rare celestial objects in massive spectral data.

Classical T Tauri stars: accretion, wind, dust

Classical T Tauri stars (CTTS) are at the early evolutionary stage when the processes of planet formation take place in the surrounding accretion disks. Most of the observed activity in CTTS is due to magnetospheric accretion and wind flows. Observations of the accreting gas flows and appearance of the line-dependent veiling of the photospheric spectrum in CTTS are considered. Evidence for the dusty wind causing the observed irregular variability of CTTS is presented. Photometric and spectroscopic monitoring of two CTTS, RY Tau and SU Aur, has been carried out atthe Crimean Astrophysical Observatory since 2013 aimed at studying the dynamics of accretion and wind flows on time scales from days to years. The observed variations in the dynamical parameters may be caused by changes in the accretion rate and in the global magnetic fields of CTTS.